Reimagining Educational Spaces: Traditional School Safety, Anti-Black Discipline, and an Abolitionist Future in Education

• In Event: AERA Research-in-Progress Roundtable Session 1
  In Invited Roundtable: Safety, Discipline, and Violence in Education Contexts (Table 7)

Abstract

Schools should be safe havens where students can learn and grow in a supportive environment. Gates, security cameras, and school resource officers have become a superficial solution to school safety that replicates prisons’ notion of captivity. The criminalization of school discipline for minor infractions perpetuates the preschool-to-prison pipeline. Black bodies are dehumanized, overpoliced, and unprotected as their resistance to captivity is seen as a threat to educational leaders. Traditional school safety scholarship depicted youth as the primary threat to school safety. Still, few have investigated how schools themselves function as sites of state violence. I will look at the evolution of school safety and see how abolition and Black feminism perspectives could help to reimagine schools as liberatory spaces.

Author

• Alycia Ellington, University of California - Santa Cruz